Three On a Ticket (1947)

Three On a Ticket was the fourth of the five Mike Shayne PI thriller B-movies made by PRC in 1946-47, with Hugh Beaumont as Mike. Prior to this Twentieth Century Fox had made seven Mike Shayne movies with Lloyd Nolan. Despite the much lower budgets I actually prefer the PRC films. They’re closer in feel to the novels, they’re a bit grittier, they have less annoying comic relief and while I like Lloyd Nolan as an actor I think Beaumont was a better fit for the role.

The Mike Shayne private eye novels were published under the name Brett Halliday, a pseudonym used by Davis Dresser. Dresser wrote the early novels in the series while the later novels were written by an assortment of ghost writers. Mike Shayne is a pretty standard fictional PI and the books have a fairly hardboiled vibe.

Three On a Ticket begins when a guy walks into Mike Shayne’s office and promptly drops dead. A bullet in the guts can do that to you. Mike and his faithful secretary Phyllis (Cheryl Walker) are rather disconcerted. Mike doesn’t want the cops to know he was in the office at the time, mostly because the first thing he did was to conceal two vital pieces of evidence. One of them is a baggage claim ticket.

The dead guy was another PI, Jim Lacy. Mike used to be vaguely acquainted with him but preferred to keep his distance because of Lacy’s unsavoury reputation.

Dead guys can mean trouble but Mike’s next visitor is a very Iive blonde and they always mean trouble. The blonde is Helen Brimstead (Louise Currie) and she wants to hire Mike to do a very simple job. All he has to do is kill her husband.

Murder is not one of the services Mike provides for his clients but he strings her along because she tells him that Jim Lacy recommended him. Obviously the blonde is mixed up in whatever led to Lacy’s murder and Mike wants the answers to that. The blonde spins a yarn about having married a hoodlum named Mace Morgan. Now she wants to marry a rich respectable guy and Mace is blackmailing her.

All sorts of people seem to know about that baggage claim ticket, they all suspect Mike has it stashed somewhere and they all want it. The Feds want it as well. The blonde has been involved with some tough characters and they definitely want it.

The plot isn’t dazzling but it has a few reasonably decent twists.

Hugh Beaumont plays Shayne as a likeable rogue. Cheryl Walker as Phyllis is feisty. Louise Currie as Helen is a reasonably effective femme fatale type (although of course we don’t know for sure if Helen is a bad girl or if she just looks like one). The supporting players are adequate.

This is a PRC movie so it looks cheap (because it was) and it’s a bit rough around the edges) but it moves along briskly.

Sam Newfield may not have been a great director but he was very competent when it came to making B-movies on tight budgets.

Three On a Ticket is a solid enjoyable B-picture. Recommended.

All five PRC Shayne movies are included in DFVD set from Classic Flix. The transfers are nothing to get excited about but they’re perfectly watchable.

I’ve reviewed a couple of the earlier PRC Mike Shayne movies - the excellent Murder Is My Business (1946) and Larceny in Her Heart (1946). I’ve also reviewed the 1945 Mike Shayne novel by Brett Halliday Murder Is My Business.

Bulldog Drummond’s Secret Police (1939)

Bulldog Drummond’s Secret Police is a very late entry in Paramount’s popular Bulldog Drummond B-movie cycle.

Captain Hugh Drummond (John Howard) is about to marry his lady love, Phyllis Clavering (Heather Angel). He has decided that they will live in his ancient ancestral home, Rockingham Tower, which has been closed up for years.

A tedious ongoing gag in these movies is that Hugh and Phyllis are always about to get married but then Hugh gets caught up in another crime-fighting or espionage adventure and the wedding gets postponed once again.

In this case the first sign that wedding bells might not be in the offing after all is the arrival of a dotty historian, Professor Downie (Forrester Harvey), who claims to have found evidence that there is a fabulous treasure hidden somewhere in Rockingham Tower. It is the treasure of King Charles I, concealed there after the Battle of Naseby in 1645.

However there is dirty work afoot, there is murder and it is clear that someone else is after that treasure.

To find the treasure Hugh will have to crack a fiendishly complex 17th century cypher. Everybody knows that Rockingham Tower is riddled with secret passageways but no-one knows how to find them.

After several further murders it all leads up to a fairly exciting action finale.

The character Bulldog Drummond was created by H. C. McNeile (using the pseudonym Sapper) in 1920 and featured in a wildly successful series of thriller novels. The character in these B-movies bears no resemblance whatsoever to McNeile’s character. McNeile’s Drummond is a larger-than-life character, much more ruthless, much edgier, much rougher, much more boisterous and rambunctious and has a schoolboy sense of humour. A far cry from the bland debonair upper-class nonentity of the movies.

The movies are played mostly for comedy. In fact almost entirely for comedy. This was the same mistake that made the 1930s Perry Mason movies almost unwatchable. Bulldog Drummond’s Secret Police is mostly comic relief with a few thriller elements thrown in.

There is quite a bit of humour in the novels. The difference is that the humour in the novels is actually funny and it doesn’t overwhelm the thriller stories.

The novels also have properly constructed properly thought-out plots which is more than can be said for the paper-thin plot of this movie.

John Howard is not a terrible actor but he’s totally wrong for the part. Reginald Denny is exasperatingly tiresome and unfunny as Hugh’s pal Algy Longworth. Elizabeth Patterson as Phyllis’s aunt adds even more unnecessary and irritating comic relief.

Worst of all we get an extended dream sequence which is just an excuse to pad out the running time with clips from earlier movies in the series.

The action sequences at the end are done quite well but they’re not enough to compensate for the tedium one has to go through first.

Bulldog Drummond’s Secret Police is a chore to watch. I’d avoid this one.

I have a copy of this movie in a Mill Creek 50-movie pack. The transfer is as you’d expect - it’s watchable but rather poor.

This movie is ostensibly based on H. C. McNeile’s 1929 novel Temple Tower but has almost nothing in common with the novel. Don’t judge the Bulldog Drummond novels on the basis of these mediocre B-movies. They’re highly entertaining. I’ve reviewed Temple Tower elsewhere and it’s very good.

Shadow of a Doubt (1943) - Hitchcock Friday #12

Shadow of a Doubt, released in 1943, is one of Alfred Hitchcock’s most admired movies. For some bizarre reason it sometimes gets labelled as a film noir despite not having a single one of the defining characteristics of film noir.

The Newtons are a thoroughly conventional American family living in a small town in California. The eldest daughter Charlie (Teresa Wright) is very excited by the news that her favourite uncle, her mother’s younger brother, is coming for an extended visit. Charlie Newton was named after her Uncle Charlie, Charlie Oakley (Joseph Cotten).

Young Charlie slowly comes to suspect that her beloved uncle, whom she hero-worships, may be a criminal on the run. She slowly pieces together bits of evidence.

We know that Charlie is certainly on the run from something. That’s obvious right from the start. Of course a man might be on the run from many things - gambling debts, gangsters, an unhappy relationship, an irate husband, a minor scandal. All we know is that two guys have been following him.

We also know that Uncle Charlie is rather secretive. He hates having his photograph taken. He hates being questioned about his past.

Those two guys who were following Uncle Charlie turn up in town. They seem very interested in the Newton household. A bit too interested.

Young Charlie is disturbed by the arrival of detectives. She cannot believe Uncle Charlie could have done anything seriously wrong. But suspicion has taken root.

This movie makes an intriguing companion piece to Suspicion, made two years earlier. Both deal with a woman tortured by suspicions about a man for whom she cares. In both cases all the woman has are suspicions. She has no hard evidence.

Hitchcock was a great believer in the essential ingredient of suspense - the audience should know more than the protagonist knows. The suspense comes from the fact that our knowledge makes us fear for the protagonist’s safety. In Suspicion and Shadow of a Doubt he varied that formula. In both these movies the audience also has nothing but suspicions. We don’t know if the man in question is guilty or not. These are movies that combine mystery with suspense.

Both movies have an atmosphere of paranoia but that is not enough to qualify a movie as film noir. Shadow of a Doubt does not employ voiceover narration or flashbacks. The protagonist is not a true noir protagonist. Shadow of a Doubt is beautifully shot (by Joseph Valentine) but it does not have the classic noir visual style. Both these movies are psychological thrillers as well as suspense thrillers but their noir credentials are very very dubious indeed. If Shadow of a Doubt is film noir then every psychological thriller ever made is film noir.

Hitchcock was notorious for preferring to avoid location shooting but unusually Shadow of a Doubt was shot mostly on location. This was his first movie to have a really strong American flavour. Small town America does not serve as a picturesque background here. It is part of the very fabric of the story. It was as if Hitch wanted to shot on location to immerse himself fully in Americana and it worked.

Joseph Cotten gives one of his best performances. Uncle Charlie may or may not be a murderer but he definitely has a jaundiced view of life and yet he has charm and vitality. He’s complex and contradictory. Cotten manages to make him very likeable and very worrying at the same time. Teresa Wright is OK. The support cast is fine. Young Charlie’s father and his pal Herb (Hume Cromyn) provide comic relief with their shared interest in murder mysteries.

As it stands Shadow of a Doubt is a more successful movie than Suspicion although had Hitchcock been allowed to go wth his original ending for Suspicion then it would have been the better movie. Shadow of a Doubt still stands as one of Hitchcock’s two 1940s masterpieces (along with Rebecca). Very highly recommended.

The Blu-Ray looks great and includes an excellent documentary dating from 2000.

Act of Murder (1964)

Act of Murder is a late (1964) entry in the British Merton Park Studios Edgar Wallace B-movie cycle.

The film plunges us straight into a romantic triangle. Actress Anne Longman (Justine Lord) quit the theatre to marry Ralph Longman (Anthony Bate). This did not please Tim Ford (John Carson). But given that Ralph is charming, civilised and rich and Tim is a whiny loser actor she probably made the sensible choice.

Anne and Ralph live in a farmhouse in the country. They are planning a holiday. They are going to swap houses with a very nice middle-aged couple in London. They’re looking forward to a couple of weeks in a luxury London flat.

The plot twists start early in this movie and they keep coming, and they’re clever and unexpected. Which means I’m not going to tell you anything at all about the plot, other than the fact that there are lots of things that are not what they seem.

Lewis Davidson’s screenplay really is impressive.

At first the plot twists are just odd and puzzling. Then they become creepy and disturbing.

We know that someone has some kind of devious plan but we have no idea which of the main characters that someone might be.

There’s a mystery here but we’re also in psychological thriller territory.

We can think of an obvious solution to part of the mystery but that leaves some nagging questions unanswered.

The paranoia level slowly builds.

Like most of the directors involved in this cycle of films Alan Bridges worked mostly in television but he did a few feature films including the rather good slightly offbeat 1966 science fiction movie Invasion. He does a pretty nice job here. Act of Murder has just a bit more style and polish than you expect in a low-budget movie, with interesting camera angles and a few welcome visual flourishes.

Anthony Bate and John Carson were always reliable actors and they’re both very good here, as is Justine Lord. All three leads manage to be ambiguous, which is exactly as it should be. None of them play their roles as obvious villains, but they don’t play them as paragons of virtue either. All the characters, including the minor characters, are to some degree morally compromised.

I don’t think any of these Edgar Wallace B-movies could possibly be described as film noir but this one does perhaps have just the faintest noir tinge.

There’s also an almost-nude scene which was about as daring as you could be in Britain in 1964. There’s definitely plenty of sexual tension.

Act of Murder is a very well-crafted above-average crime melodrama B-movie with a pleasingly hard-edged nasty streak to it. Highly recommended.

Act of Murder is included in Network’s Edgar Wallace Mysteries volume 6 DVD boxed set. These wonderful boxed sets are unfortunately becoming a bit hard to find now but if you come across them grab them. The 16:9 enhanced transfer (these movies were all shot in black-and-white and widescreen) is very nice.

West of Zanzibar (1928)

West of Zanzibar is a 1928 silent tropical melodrama with a major helping of horror. It was directed by Tod Browning and stars Lon Chaney.

It was remade four years later as a talkie (Kongo), directed by William J. Cowen and starring Walter Huston. Which is the better version? That’s a controversial question. Both versions are certainly outrageous. Sadly no complete uncut print of West of Zanzibar appears to have survived but at least reasonably complete prints have survived. Many of Browning’s most famous silent movies have not survived at all, or only exist as fragments.

West of Zanzibar begins with a prologue. Stage magician Phroso (Lon Chaney) has his wife stolen from him by Crane (Lionel Barrymore). The wife then has a daughter by Crane. Phroso vows revenge on the man who stole his wife, and on Crane’s illegitimate daughter.

Phroso loses the use of his legs in circumstances that are left a little unclear.

Eighteen years later Phroso, now known by the nickname Dead-Legs, is living in the heart of the African jungle, on the shores of the Congo River. He has collected a kind of human menagerie. He’s the physical cripple but his cronies are psychologically crippled. This includes Doc (Warner Baxter). Phroso needs him to keep the pain from his injuries at bay.

Phroso’ menagerie also includes Anna (Jacqueline Gadsdon), a prostitute. Phroso delights in humiliating her. Doc usually leaps to her defence, only to be intimidated into backing down. That humiliates him, which adds to Phroso’s pleasure.

Phroso makes his living by stealing ivory from rival traders. Or rather he steals ivory from one particular trader, whose name happens to be Crane. The local tribe serves Phroso loyally. He uses his skills as a stage illusionist to convince them that he is an immensely powerful witch-doctor. Phroso is a kind of king.

That illegitimate daughter of Phroso, Maizie (Mary Nolan), has been working in a brothel in Zanzibar. She doesn’t know it but that was Phroso’s doing. Now Phroso has lured Maizie to his jungle kingdom.

Phroso is ready to exact his vengeance, and a very cruel and twisted vengeance it is. He has a plan to deal with both Crane and Maizie.

Doc and Maizie start to fall in love but that doesn’t worry Phroso - he despises Doc but he is confident he can continue to wreck Doc’s life.

There are some nasty twists to come. Nasty for everyone concerned.

Lon Chaney is very good, but Walter Huston in the 1932 remake Kongo is a lot better. The acting in West of Zanzibar is a very mixed bag. Mary Nolan’s performance is of the sort that quite unfairly gives silent movies a bad name. In the equivalent role in Kongo Virginia Bruce is much more effective. Lionel Barrymore is less hammy than usual. Warner Baxter is quite good.  

Even though it’s much tamer than the remake this movie is guaranteed to upset sensitive souls.

The surviving print runs for 65 minutes but the original running time was 75 minutes. One can’t help suspecting that this is a censored print. There’s a vague hint that Phroso keeps his human menagerie under control by feeding them drugs but it’s not made explicit. We’re not told that Anna is a prostitute but it seems highly likely. All of the depravity - alcoholism, drug addiction, prostitution, white slavery and sadomasochism - is made quite explicit in the 1932 version, Kongo. Perhaps it was explicit in West of Zanzibar as well but those scenes were cut.

West of Zanzibar is quite a good movie and it’s worth seeing but Kongo is superb and an absolute must-see pre-code movie. West of Zanzibar is recommended.

China (1943)

China is a 1943 Paramount wartime adventure thriller.

David Llewellyn Jones (Alan Ladd) and Johnny Sparrow (William Bendix) are American businessmen and adventurers in China. This sounds like a setup for a fun movie but as we’ll see there’s not much fun to be had here.

It is 1941 and the Sino-Japanese War is raging. Jones and Johnny Sparrow trade with anyone, including the Japanese. Given that at this stage Japan and the United States are at peace there is of course absolutely no reason why they should not do so but we are constantly told how wicked Jones is to do this.

These two traders encounter Carolyn Grant (Loretta Young), a very moral American do-gooder. She wants them to use their truck to transport a dozen Chinese girls to Chungdu, well away from the advancing Japanese Army.

Jones sees no reason why he should do this. Eventually he changes his mind when he realises that the Japanese are wicked enemies.

Jones turns from a cynical hardbitten adventurer into an idealistic morally righteous crusader for freedom and democracy. We get some speeches to explain all this. Jones ends up deciding to take on an entire Japanese division with the aid of half a dozen Chinese guerrillas.

These girls are trainee schoolteachers who are going to build a new China and we get some speeches about that as well. We get quite a bit of speechifying.

Jones of course wants to find redemption, having previously devoted his life to wicked pursuits such as making a living and chasing girls. He must become a Hero.

This is a movie in which the leading man and leading lady have absolutely zero chemistry. It’s not as if they initially dislike each other. There’s just nothing. When, very late in the picture, we finally get a love scene between them it doesn’t ring true at all. And they still have zero chemistry.

Thee’s also a weird scene in which, totally out of left field, Johnny Sparrow declares his love for Miss Grant. He obviously doesn’t realise he’s the sidekick and the sidekick never gets the girl. Miss Grant however has pigeonholed him immediately as a sidekick and therefore unworthy of her love. And that scene is then quietly forgotten.

This is a very well-made movie. Australian director John Farrow had a great love for long takes and extended tracking shots and there are some fine examples of the latter in this film. Farrow had major faults as a director but he had his virtues as well and he was technically very accomplished. The action scenes are handled well, although they also have a real edge of nastiness. The audience is expected to take great glee in seeing Japanese soldiers mown down by machine guns. They are after all America’s enemies.

I have always disliked war movies and especially war movies made during wartime and this movie reminded me why. They are invariably propaganda and the propaganda in this movie is very crude indeed. The Japanese in this movie are fiendish cartoon villains. The Chinese are all brave and noble and honourable.

China also suffers from an excess of syrupy sentimentality.

Alan Ladd is one of my favourite actors but this is not one of his better performances. To be fair Frank Butler’s clumsy screenplay doesn’t give him much to work with. William Bendix is OK. Loretta Young is all self-satisfied moral righteousness. I love her early pre-code performances but here she’s rather dull and irritating.

China is pure propaganda from start to finish. The story and the characters don’t matter, what matters is bludgeoning the viewer with the message. I seriously advise you to avoid this movie.

Kino Lorber’s Blu-Ray release looks great.

They Died with Their Boots On (1941)

I’m not a fan of historical movies or of biopics and They Died with Their Boots On, a 1941 Warner Brothers release, is both. It’s a movie I was therefore always going to approach with a certain scepticism. I have never understood why anyone would want to make historical movies or biopics that are mostly pure fantasy and I have never understood why anyone would want to watch such movies.

This movie is also a western of sorts and it is very much an epic. That made Raoul Walsh the ideal director. Walsh had directed The Thief of Bagdad for Douglas Fairbanks in 1924 and while Fairbanks was very much the auteur and Walsh’s job was simply to put Fairbanks’ vision on screen it still provided Walsh with invaluable training in handling epic material and huge productions. And Walsh had already directed a western epic, The Big Trail, in 1930. There was no way that Raoul Walsh was going to be intimidated by a project such as They Died with Their Boots On.

And since this is a movie about George Armstrong Custer, one of the most colourful and controversial men in American history, Errol Flynn was a very obvious casting choice indeed. Whatever you think of Custer he was a larger-than-life character and Flynn was most definitely was a larger-than-life figure himself.

It’s a very long movie and it takes us two hours and twenty minutes to get to the Battle of the Little Bighorn. It begins with Custer’s extraordinary career at West Point which is not exaggerated very much. Custer really did have one of the worst disciplinary records in the history of that august institution.

While at West Point he meets Elizabeth Bacon (Olivia de Havilland). They both know they’re destined to get married, which they eventually do.

Custer’s spectacular career in the Civil War (he was a general at the age of 23) gets plenty of attention. Some of this stuff is historical and some is pure fantasy.

Custer fails to adjust to civilian life and starts to fall apart until his wife pulls some strings and gets him put back on the active list. He is to take command of a ragtag bunch of hopeless new recruits. He will build them into the legendary 7th Cavalry. There are battles with the Sioux until Custer and Crazy Horse (Anthony Quinn) decide they both want peace. Custer trusts Crazy Horse and Crazy Horse trusts Custer. They are both right to do so. Custer persuades Crazy Horse that he can trust the US Government as well and should sign a treaty. Trusting the US Government turns out to be a very big mistake.

The US Government is not the only problem. There are also crooked businessmen who want the last remaining lands of the Plains Indians. Every single businessman and politician in this movie is a liar, a cheat and a crook.

This is a movie that is very sympathetic to the Sioux and the other tribes and to Crazy Horse. Custer is the hero and always behave honourably but in the events leading up to the Battle of the Little Bighorn the movie makes it quite explicit that the US Government were the bad guys.

Custer and Crazy Horse are both brave, honourable decent men but they are helpless in the face of the manipulations of those crooked businessmen and politicians. And so they end up facing each other at the Little Bighorn.

Flynn is magnificent. He plays Custer like a dashing figure from an adventure novel and that is more or less how Custer lived his life. No-one did adventure heroes better than Flynn but here he gets the chance to show that he was quite capable of displaying subtlety and emotional depth as well.

Flynn and Olivia de Havilland always made a great romantic pairing and this film is no exception.

Mention must be made of Sydney Greenstreet’s wonderful turn as the army commander-in-chief Winfield Scott. He’s a joy to watch.

As you’d expect Walsh handles the action scenes with plenty of skill. There is a very real sense of tragedy to this movie. Custer is drawn inexorably to his fate by his thirst for both glory and honour. The movie is of course utter nonsense as history but that’s Hollywood. It’s still wildly entertaining. That sense of tragedy makes this more than just a movie about heroism. Highly recommended.

The DVD release includes a brief TCM featurette on the movie made about twenty years ago so it’s mercifully free of ideological lecturing.